What evil feels like? You imply you have knowledge and a certain wisdom in this realm. I want to believe you. I do believe you, actually. I just do not believe you enough. Show me.

It's interesting that this involves your son. My most terrible and devastating dreams involve the sudden lost-ness of my son. I can't find him; he is lost; never so much that he is in danger, just that he can't be saved or found. That is the no-thing that terrifies me the most. And I'm in my 70's. Love your stuff, Charles. Thanks.

The emptiness, the void, is not death. Death is too easy, death is glib. Anyone can handle death.

The emptiness is the existential emptiness, the internal emptiness of the living. The emptiness is the absence of any reason for being, any meaning to our miniscule lives. The religious would call it an absence of faith, an absence of God.

Many have tried to fend off the emptiness with children, but the emptiness eats children. The emptiness returns, always. It drives some mad, and drives others to search in vain for something, anything, to fill it. Ideology can not fill it, wealth and station can not fill it, neither truth nor justice nor great works can fill it, not even gods can fill it. Yet a man will continue to chase all of these, turning to one as the other falls short.

And the basement is socialism. I mean, duh.